Part 3 (1/2)
Since this incident was the original UFO sighting, I used to get et the true and accurate story of what did happen to Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, I had to go back through old newspaper files, official reports, and talk to people who had worked on Project Sign By cross-checking these data and talking to people who had heard Arnold tell about his UFO sighting soon after it happened, I finally came up hat I believe is the accurate story
Arnold had taken off fro to fly to Yakiton About 3:00PM he arrived in the vicinity of Mount Rainier There was a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane lost in the Mount Rainier area, so Arnold decided to fly around awhile and look for it He was looking down at the ground when suddenly he noticed a series of bright flashes off to his left He looked for the source of the flashes and saw a string of nine very bright disk- shaped objects, which he esti from north to south across the nose of his airplane They were flying in a reversed echelon (ie, lead object high with the rest stepped down), and as they flew along they weaved in and out between thebehind one of the peaks Each individual object had a skippingacross water”
During the tiht, Arnold had clocked their speed He had ain noted the tiht path that the objects had flown and computed their speed, almost 1,700 miles per hour He estimated that they had been 20 to 25 miles away and had traveled 47 miles in 102 seconds
I found that there was a lot of speculation on this report Two factions at ATIC had joined up behind two lines of reasoning One side said that Arnold had seen plain, everyday jet airplanes flying in forument was based on the physical limitations of the human eye, visual acuity, the eye's ability to see a small, distant object Tests, they showed, had proved that a person with norle of less than 02 second of arc For example, a basketball can't be seen at a distance of several miles but if you move the basketball closer and closer, at sole between the top and bottom of the ball and your eye will be about 02 of a second of arc This was applied to Arnold's sighting
The ”Arnold-saw-airplanes” faction maintained that since Arnold said that the objects were 45 to 50 feet long they would have had to be much closer than he had estimated or he couldn't even have seen them at all Since they were much closer than he esti 1,700at a speed closer to 400 miles per hour, the speed of a jet There was no reason to believe they weren't jets The jets appeared to have a skipping h layers of war from a hot pavement that cause an object to shi+mmer
The other side didn't buy this idea at all They based their argument on the fact that Arnold knehere the objects hen he timed them
After all, he was an old mountain pilot and was as familiar with the area around the Cascade Mountains as he ith his own living room
To cinch this point the fact that the objects had passed _behind_ a ht up This positively established the distance the objects were from Arnold and confirmed his calculated 1,700-miles-per-hour speed Besides, no airplane can weave in and out betweenthethened the ”Arnold-saw-a- flying-saucer” faction's theory that what he'd seen was a spaceshi+p
If he could see the objects 20 to 25instead of the poorly estimated 45 to 50 feet
In 1947 this was a fantastic story, but now it is just another UFO report marked ”Unknown” It is typical in that if the facts are accurate, if Arnold actually did see the UFO's go _behind_ a mountain peak, and if he knew his exact position at the tihed off; but there are always ”ifs” in UFO reports This is the type of report that led Major General John A
Saence for Headquarters, Air Force, toa press conference in July 1952: ”However, there have ree of this total [of all UFO reports received by the Air Force], about 20 per cent of the reports, that have cos We keep on being concerned about the the Arnold incident, the writers of saucer lore haven't been content to confine theed in the crashed Marine Corps' C-46
They inti saucers that Arnold saw shot down the C-46, grabbed up the bodies of the passengers and crew, and now have them pickled at the University of Venus Medical School As proof they apply the sa The military never released photos of the bodies of the dead raphs and there were bodies In consideration of the faers, photos of air crashes showing dead bodies are never released
Arnold himself seems to be the reason for a lot of the excite saucers Stories of odd incidents that occur in this world are continually being reported by newspapers, but never on the scale of the first UFO report Occasional stories of the ”Himalayan snowmen,” or the ”Malayan es of newspapers Arnold's story, if it didn't e I had the reason for this explained toa series of UFO reports in California in the spring of 1952
I was hter-boh a hter- bomber pilots who had known Arnold In civilian life the pilot was a newspaper reporter and had worked on the original Arnold story He told me that when the story first broke all the newspaper editors in the area were thoroughly convinced that the incident was a hoax, and that they intended to write the story as such Theinto the facts, however, and into Arnold's reputation, thean unquestionable character, he was an excellent mountain pilot, and mountain pilots are a breed of men who know every nook and cranny of the mountains in their area The most fantastic part of Arnold's story had been the 1,700- the objects between two landmarks ”When Arnold told us how he computed the speed,” my chance acquaintance told me, ”we all put a lot of faith in his story” He went on to say that when the editors found out that they rong about the hoax, they did a complete about-face, and were very much impressed by the story This enthusiasm spread, and since the Air Force so quickly denied ownershi+p of the objects, all of the facts built up into a story so unique that papers all over the world gave it front-page space
There was an old theory thatthe ot a flat ”Impossible” My expert on the early Arnold era said, ”I've lived in the Pacific Northwest many years and have flown in the area for hundreds of hours It's iet powder sno in the mountains in June Personally, I believe Arnold saw some kind of aircraft and they weren't from this earth” He went on to tell s that had happened the day after Arnold saw the nine disks He knew the people who o off ”half cocked” He offered to get a T-6 and fly me up to Boise to talk to them since they had never made a report to the military, but I had to return to Dayton so I declined
Within a few days of Arnold's sighting, others began to co near Lake Mead, Nevada, when he saw a for This was about three-fifteen in the afternoon
That night at nine-twenty, four Air Force officers, two pilots, and two intelligence officers froht traveling across the sky It was first seen just above the horizon, and as it traveled toward the observers it ”zigzagged,” with bursts of high speed When it was directly overhead it ree turn and was lost from view as it traveled south
Other reports cao over her house ”like blue blazes,” heading south A school bus driver in Clarion, Iowa, saw an object streak across the sky In a few seconds twelveGround in New Mexico chalked up the first of the s that this location would produce when several people riding in an autoht travel froo housewife saw one ”with legs”
The week of July 4, 1947, set a record for reports that was not broken until 1952 The center of activity was the Portland, Oregon, area At 11:00AM a carload of people driving near Red past Mount Jefferson At 1:05PM a police lot behind the Portland City Police Headquarters when he noticed soan to flutter around as if they were scared He looked up and saw five large disk- shaped objects, two going south and three going east They were traveling at a high rate of speed and see about their lateral axis Minutes later two other police in trail Before long the harbor patrol called into headquarters A crew of four patrolmen had seen three to six of the disks, ”shaped like chro very fast They also oscillated as they flew Then the citizens of Portland began to see the north At four-thirty a woman called in and had just seen one that looked like ”a new di southeast, one northeast Fro northwest In Vancouver, Washi+ngton, sheriff's deputies saenty to thirty
The first photo was taken on July 4 in Seattle After much publicity it turned out to be a weather balloon
That night a United Airlines crew flying near Emmett, Idaho, saw five The pilot's report read:
Five ”soh-appearing on top, were seen silhouetted against the sunset shortly after the plane took off from Boise at 8:04PM We saw them clearly We followed them in a northeasterly direction for about 45 miles They finally disappeared We were unable to tell whether they outsped us or disintegrated We can't say whether they were ”s else but whatever they were they were not aircraft, clouds or smoke
Civilians did not have a corner on the ha across the sky and photographed one of theht, disk-shaped object ”low at nine o'clock” This is one of the few reports of an object lower than the aircraft At Fairfield-Suisun AFB in California a pilot saw so travel three quarters of the way across the sky in a few seconds It, too, was oscillating on its lateral axis
According to the old hands at ATIC, the first sighting that really made the Air Force take a deep interest in UFO's occurred on July 8 at Muroc Air Base (noards AFB), the supersecret Air Force test center in the Mojave Desert of California At 10:10AM a test pilot was running up the engine of the then new XP-84 in preparation for a test flight He happened to look up and to the north he sahat first appeared to be a weather balloon traveling in a westerly direction After watching it a few seconds, he changed his h-altitude winds, and the object he saas going against the wind Had it been the size of a normal aircraft, the test pilot estimated that it would have been at 10,000 to 12,000 feet and traveling 200 to 225spherically shaped and yellohite in color